Amai
by ChibiRisu-chan
Summary: KakaIru Side Effects spinoff written in half an hour to try to catch the Feb 14 date stamp and compensate for a fried hard drive...


**Title:** Amai

**Author:** me

**Rating:** PG-13

**Summary:** Set somewhere between chapters 1 and 2 of Side Effects. Translation, Kakashi and Iruka are in another village undercover, Iruka's teaching school, and Iruka's using Sexy-no-Jutsu to be their polite female schoolteacher married to the town's semiprofessional slacker (aka Kakashi).Er. Don't remember the rest of what this form was supposed to talk about. Anyway. On with completely unedited stream of consciousness fic written in half an hour just to try to get the Valentine's date stamp... (Okay, WTF is up with mangling half the punctuation in dialogue?No longer allowed to use commas, question marks, or exclamation points around quotation marks! I didn't edit but I swear I am NOT THAT BAD even when not editing. Too tired tonight. Will fix tomorrow if this doesn't work, I swear. But it wasn't me.)

* * *

Iruka had burned his hands three times in the process of trying to cover little piles of walnuts with white and dark chocolate in a pattern that was supposed to end up with the shape of the kanji for "love" on the back of each little choco-gooey blob, but which mostly ended up looking like chicken scratchings. With a sigh, he gingerly started re-dipping most of the little horrors in a solid chocolate coat to try to disguise his general frosting-impairedness. The boys in the class would get dark chocolate outsides and white chocolate insides; the girls would get the white chocolate on the outside, and they'd all get an explanation of Valentine's Day and White Day. 

But some of them...

Iruka looked at the pile he'd set aside specially, and sighed.

Giri-chocolate for the children, yes, fine, cheating was all right; they'd devour it even if Iruka had left the chicken-scratchings on the outside.

But for Kakashi...

Honmei-chocolate was always harder than giri-chocolate; honmei-chocolate had to be made well enough to do justice to your feelings, and Iruka always spent hours struggling with it. Which wasn't necessarily a good thing, because chocolate didn't like being reheated and cooled off accidentally and fussed around with over and over...

There were times when he envied Kakashi his legendary skills. Because if Iruka could have spent a couple of hours with both eyes watching a confectioner make chocolates and come home with the skills to start up a restaurant, it would have made it much easier to convince his hands to express what he could never quite find non-blushing words for.

But then, really, a semiperpetual state of clumsiness around Kakashi, always well-intentioned but not-quite-inspired-enough-to-be-unembarrassing, seemed to be the theme of Iruka's life...

Iruka was never sure whether Kakashi bought the chocolates he brought, or whether he made them. Iruka felt somehow that jonmei-chocolate ought to be hand-made, and while Kakashi was certainly a man of surprising hidden talents, domesticity had never been one he admitted to. On the other hand, he certainly wouldn't have put it past the man to create some lazy-man's artisinal jutsu that let him pick a live rose and perform a convoluted kawarimi that replaced the rose-shape with tinted white chocolate in order to get the perfect blossom he'd presented last year, the one that had started to melt in Iruka's suddenly-blush-warm hands as he held it, trembling and voiceless...

And the chocolate was getting cold again. With a sigh, Iruka put the chocolate pot back over the double-boiler to reheat it, stirring vigorously and hoping the chocolate hadn't gotten too crystallized. Then he fumbled around for a chopstick and dipped the tip, and with his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration, he tried to keep his hands from shaking as he tried for the seventh time to trace the character for "love" onto Kakashi's chocolate-cluster.

The children loved their chocolates, of course. All the chocolate was gone and sticky fingers were being licked in a fraction of the time it had taken to make them. Rather startled by their appetites, and surreptitiously checking his hands to make sure he didn't have any lingering chocolate spots that might trigger a preadolescent feeding frenzy on appendages he needed for writing, Iruka started in on a rather stumbling explanation of the holiday traditions.

Kakashi came home late, when dinner was long since cold, and deposited a casual kiss on Iruka's cheek and flopped into the sofa with a groan.

Awkwardly, shyly, Iruka crept into the kitchen, and then came back out with the plate of rather lopsided chocolates.

"For me? Thank you!"

...Kakashi's appetite appeared to rival the kids'. Iruka had to move quickly to get his finegrs out of the way before Kakashi's teeth met in the last one.

Iruka stood there for a painfully silent minute, shifting from one foot to the other.

_Not going to ask - too embarrassing - but - he's brought me chocolate before - but it's rude to count on it; I just... I thought... I thought he'd want to... but..._

From where he was curled on the sofa all but purring in bliss, Kakashi opened one eye and asked lazily, "Want something?"

"Never mind" Iruka said, because the humiliation and the hurt together were scalding all the way down his back. "I'm sorry. I'll go- I didn't mean- I'm sorry..."

Kakashi had him by the wrist before he could even blink. "No you don't."

"But..." Eyes shut tight, Iruka somehow managed to squeak around the lump in his throat, "I don't know if you forgot or if - if you didn't want to - or - if I've done something - but it's all right, I shouldn't have thought..."

Kakashi's lips silenced the rest of the routine. He still tasted of chocolate.

"Um," Iruka managed, remarkably intelligently under the circumstances. "That's a... novel way to... return chocolates..."

"Oh? Give it back, then," Kakashi said, and then went tonsil-diving again.

When he was done, Iruka sank carefully onto the edge of the sofa, trying to get his lungs and his brain back in functioning order. He mostly managed an inquisitive little meep.

Smirking with an expression he _must_ have copied from an Uchiha, Kakashi said, "Not going to ask?"

"Er," Iruka managed. "Uh..."

Kakashi chuckled, and the sound sent shivers down Iruka's spine. "I can't give you chocolate today," he said, not in the least apologetic. "You're their nice lady sensei, remember? It's your turn on White Day."

"Oh," Iruka said, feeling like five kinds of fool. "Um. All right. -Aren't you going to let go?"

"You're not paying attention, sensei," Kakashi said, waggling something that looked like a paintbrush under Iruka's nose, so that his eyes crossed trying to follow the motion.

"Huh?"

"I can't give you _chocolate,_" Kakashi said, unscrewing the lid of a jar filled with a sticky golden substance. "But nobody said anything about, say, butterscotch..."

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Author's notes: 

My hard drive fried itself on Friday. I lost four months of work. DON'T pester me about when Side Effects will be updated again, because you will hear my screams on whichever continent you're inhabiting. Oh yeah - and side tip: I do NOT respond well to death threats. I could have had the next chapter up a month ago, before the hard drive melted, except for how much I was pissed off by the "Update or Die" review. So y'all have a virtually illiterate jerk who thinks (s)he's being funny to thank for the now potentially eight or more month gap between chapters...

Anyway. Determined not to let the total meltdown of my hard drive defeat me totally, I decided to write a short something or other using any network connection I could get my hands on.

At the moment, that includes dialup and Windows 95. I am so pathetic...


End file.
